Wireshark · Ethereal-dev: Re: [Ethereal-dev] Device not being reported

[Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 10:51:04PM -0400, David J. Pfaltzgraff wrote:
> Although requested to report this through the FAQ, my question is: Am I
> doing this right?

Doing what right?

The mechanism Ethereal uses to do all the work of enumerating network
interfaces itself will, on some OSes including Linux distributions, not
see devices with no IP addresses.  That doesn't mean it will necessarily
not support capturing on those devices, it just means it won't list them
in the drop-down list.  Ethereal doesn't itself require an interface to
have an IP address in order to capture on it (some older versions might
have, but that was a long time ago), and the Linux packet capture
mechanism doesn't require it, either.

Libpcap 0.7 and later have an API to enumerate network interfaces; the
code to do that should, on Linux, be able to find interfaces with no IP
addresses.  Ethereal 0.10.3 and later will, if configured at build time
to use a libpcap that has that API, use that API rather than doing the
work of enumerating interfaces itself.

Presumably either

	1) Slackware 9.1's libpcap doesn't support that API

or

	2) Ethereal wasn't built to use that API.

What does "ethereal -h" print?